You've heard plenty about biases: the thinking errors the human brain tends to make. But is there anything we can do to make ourselves *less* biased? In this episode, Massimo and Julia discuss what psychological research has learned about "de-biasing," the challenges involved, and the de-biasing strategies Julia is implementing at her organization, the Center for Applied Rationality.

Reader Comments (11)

Congratulations on CFAR and what it's already accomplished. I can't help but notice that everyone on the team is a math/statistics/computer science student or academic. The team could benefit from having someone who studies people, as in cognitive science or psychology, and someone with real-world experience outside the ivory tower, as in a physician or an industrial engineer.Also, I hope it won't become a cult like Objectivism and perhaps LessWrong.

About songs of every decade, people say that this music is the best, and the rest is crap. Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Michael Jackson, The Pixies, Sublime, Radiohead, Jack Johnson, Coldplay, etc.

One type of obstacle to de-biasing is as Julia said, when someone is unaware of their bias(es). How about someone (such as a politician) who is well aware of his bias, but believes that his bias serves some greater (and/or selfish) purpose? Such a person could easily have what they consider to be a rational basis for adhering to a bias that cannot be supported with reason (I think this would fall into the category of the noble lie). While we don't know and cannot ask him, it may be the case that this is what motivated Stephen Jay Gould to overstate his case in his book The Mismeasure of Man and to object to sociobiology in ways that were partly "the result of an unapologetic commitment that seemed to take priority over the science," as Massimo says in Nonsense on Stilts (U. Chicago Press, 2010, p. 124). In fact, in cases like this, accusations of bias may fly back and forth and both sides may deny that they are biased while privately being fully aware that they are indeed biased.

Anyway, another great podcast, thank you to everyone whose time, effort and energy makes these podcasts possible. Best wishes to Julia with the Center for Applied Rationality, and I agree with commenter Max that it would be good to see the team include members who study people and/or who have a lot of "real life" experience outside the ivory tower.

Regarding the absence of peer review in some popular science books I have two things to say. First, some popular books do go through the process of anonymous peer review, while other are read by the author's colleagues. True, it's not always the same as a journal article submission, but neither are edited books that include various chapters that were edited by one or two people.

Second and more relevant to the post, Massimo claimed that using a popular book as a source is shaky because it's largely based on the author's opinions or anecdotal data and not rigorous science (I am paraphrasing it). While it's true in some cases (Feinman for example), Shermer and Dawkins rely on many peer reviewed research that they summarize and synthesize. It make sense actually to quote one comprehensive source, than many individual sources).

I'm curious about the term "applied rationality". From what I gather it's about confronting biases to improve decision-making. But I could and actually do use these rational skills towards totally irrational ends. I'm wondering if, for rationality to be rational, it has to be an end-in-itself, and also if it is imperative that it be contained in some sort of ethical framework, kind of like how Aristotle and Kant and others have seen it.

"I would have liked to have heard more from Julia about CFAR and its research activities rather than Massimo's rather uncharitable objections to it (which I suspect even Julia may have been slightly taken aback by, but which she responded to extremely well)." - Diagoras

Actually, along the lines of Julia expecting it, I thought I noticed her voice was deeper in this episode than usual, and she seemed to be more defensive in general (it seemed her rate of speech was higher than usual as well). At one point I thought she wasn't breathing. She did well though, as always =]

Great episode. This is what I'm going to school for, to join the growing army of "decision scientists," and become a self help expert (a legitimate, non-pseudoscientific one, a.k.a. a psychologist).